Hi.

Feb 2 LET THE FUN BEGIN

It is so easy to get really carried away when renovating. There really are endless options to make the place look amazing... if you have an endless budget and unfortunately that is not what we had. We had grand ideas of knocking out walls to combine the kitchen, dining and living room so we could have indoor outdoor flow. This was then scaled back to making a cut out in the wall to to the living room from the kitchen to create a bit more flow until we were made aware that the wall we were wanting to move / cut a hole out of was load bearing and was going to cost WAY too much. We were very quickly bought back to reality and came up with a plan that meant we could open up the kitchen & dining so we could utilise the space better without spending a fortune and dealing with load bearing walls.

Right in the middle of the dining room & kitchen was a hot water cupboard, the 19th century switchboard & alarm box with some sort of breakfast bar around it. In short they were in the in most ridiculous place and meant you could hardly fit a table in the "dining room". With this we decided to get rid of it so we could have a combined kitchen / dining room. This also gave us the opportunity to move the entrance to the kitchen so we could fit a fridge & dishwasher in the kitchen. Two things we did not notice weren't in the kitchen at the open home.

About now i was so ready to just get some paint on the walls but there was quite a bit of prep that needed to be done before any of that.... boring! First day working on the house we got rid of the freestanding wardrobes that were left behind which revealed hideous mould on the walls behind them.. how people could live with that there i do not know! We also ripped up all of the mismatched dusty carpet which uncovered beautiful wooden floors in the bedrooms and living room. The second bedroom had amazing wide floor boards and the other rooms had skinnier floor boards with some patches where it looked like a fireplace had been. Although the wood was stunning and it would have been amazing to restore we decided we would carpet the bedrooms & living room. I know many people would say this was sacrilege (i did too at first) but the main reasons for doing this was cost & warmth. The colour I wanted to strip the floorboards back to would have cost quite a bit so we decided against for now.

Now that we had clear space to work we we could start..... washing down the walls & windows then get onto sanding, woo! Before that i did make sure we put some colour swatches on the walls so i could decide what colour we wanted to use. To make things simple we decided we were going to use the same colour on all the walls.

Sanding was the absolute pits, mouse sanders were a life saver but seriously got over being covered in dust from head to toe daily (I had grey hair for a couple of days). At first I thought sanding the wall bad enough creating more imperfections from the quick paint job the previous owners had done, then we started on the windows and omg I seriously wanted to give up then. The paint just came off in flaky strips which made the surface very uneven.. that was the moment I realised we would not be painting any time soon,.. and maybe we should have paid someone to do it.

While Mum & I were having a mare sanding Tyler & Dad started work on what they could in the kitchen before the tradies came in. Firstly, they ripped up the Lino in the kitchen.. all 5 layers of it. Then continued to removed the gib around the walls in the "Dining Room". I'm sure the neighbours enjoyed the peace and quiet...